A social networking system provides online services that enable account holders to interact with each other, e.g., by sharing information, comments, photos, videos, etc. A social networking system account holder (“user”) may be an individual or any other entity, e.g., a business or other non-person entity. Various relationships can be tracked within a social networking system, including connections amongst social network nodes (e.g., users, content postings, locations, group pages, event pages, comments page, etc.), including between users, between a user and a social networking object, and between a social networking object and another social networking object. A social networking object may be a user, a nonperson entity, a content item, a group, a social networking system page, a location, an application, a subject, a concept or other representations in the social networking system, e.g., a movie, a band, or a book.
Social networking system information (e.g., user profiles, social networking object profiles, and any interactions amongst users and social networking objects) that is tracked and maintained by a social networking system may be stored as a social graph, which includes multiple nodes that are interconnected by multiple edges. A social graph node may represent a social networking system object that can act on and/or be acted upon by another node, including the act of making an intentional “social connection.” Amongst user nodes, this is commonly referred to as a user “friending” another user (e.g., adding the other user as a “friend.” Each of these interactions can be stored as an edge of the social graph. The social graph can thus be stored as a database of edges and nodes, including profile data and metadata about these edges and nodes.
Services provided by the social networking system may sometimes depend on the profile data about these edges and nodes. For example, a friend recommendation to a user may require information about existing edges connected to the user and/or the user's location. However, information regarding the nodes is at times incomplete. As a result, services provided by social networking systems may be limited by the social networking systems' inability to accurately infer from existing data of the social graph additional attribute labels for the nodes and the edges.
The figures depict various embodiments of this disclosure for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles of the disclosure described herein.